


The Fall

by flippyspoon



Series: Pour Some Sugar on Me [38]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-06
Updated: 2018-12-06
Packaged: 2019-09-13 01:31:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16883052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flippyspoon/pseuds/flippyspoon





	The Fall

There’s the falling in love and the knowing you’re in love and the telling the object of your affections you’re in love…

Those are the three main events in Steve’s book.

Sometimes you don’t know when you start to fall. Steve isn’t aware of it when it happens this time and once he figures it out he feels like he’s been shoved or whacked or smacked over the head with a plate which, fine, he is that sort of romantic, but a word of warning might have been nice.

Sometimes he thinks the warning was Billy Hargrove barreling through a crowd of drunken party goers just to give him that stare-down that had either said “fight me” or “fuck me” or…both. He should’ve known then.

Steve starts to fall in love sometime after Billy has a run-in with a demogorgon that has him joining the monster fighting squad. Steve is avidly against it until he’s not, convinced by Dustin that they need to keep an eye on Billy because he’s a Wild Card (Dustin says it with what sounds like capital letters) and who knows what he’ll do.

“Keep your enemies close, Steve,” Dustin says. “And anyway, we know he can fight.”

So Steve keeps his enemy close, so close that he assures Billy he can come over any time if he needs to just crash somewhere and it’s only a little bit because he feels sorry for Billy and mostly because he wants to watch his every move as much as possible. It helps that fighting monsters seems to relax Billy in a way that should be disturbing. But Billy’s great at it and he’s kind of…good natured about the whole thing. Even helpful. Suddenly Billy is doing homework with Steve and having meals at the Harrington’s and has his own pile of beautifying products in Steve’s bathroom. Steve continues to watch Billy like a hawk at school and after school and from across his bedroom and it’s definitely only because “keep your enemies close.”

Steve starts to fall in love one Sunday morning when he thumps downstairs and finds Billy on his couch in his living room. Billy knows where the key is. He must have let himself in. But this time he didn’t bother to wake Steve up, he just curled up on the sofa with a blanket and made himself breakfast in the morning. Steve can’t figure out why he likes that so much, that somebody feels so at home in this big fancy house that often feels so cold.

Steve starts to fall in love because Billy looks up at him with those incredible blue eyes, a bowl of cereal sitting on his palm and says, “Hey! Don’t flip out, Harrington, I didn’t eat your Apple Jacks. Even saved you the toy surprise.” Then he smiles. He doesn’t smirk, he smiles. He holds up some mystery piece of plastic still encased in its wrapper to prove to Steve he saved him some stupid toy.

And Steve is fucked. He just doesn’t know it yet.

Steve knows he’s in love one day at the quarry when they’re stretched out on the hood of the Camaro, passing a cigarette back and forth and shooting the shit. Steve has never considered himself a huge talker but somehow he is with Billy. Billy’s kind of a talker but sometimes he’s calculating. Or at least he has seemed calculating to Steve in front of other people. But he doesn’t seem calculating with Steve; not anymore. He just talks and talks, usually about nothing significant but then something of note will slip in there and Steve’s ears perk up. Now Billy’s talking about his mom and he never has before.

“She used to sew all the time,” Billy is saying. “Made all her own clothes, made all my baby clothes… She made me this quilt when I was a little kid with all these puppies on it and the puppies had floppy ears stitched onto the quilt? I’d play with these floppy ears like made of felt and shit… Had that thing forever…” Billy stops as if he’s suddenly realized what he’s been saying and is supremely embarrassed. Steve watches him slowly turn red and an intense desire to keep him talking comes over him.

Steve says, “She sounds a lot cooler than my mom.”

“She was,” Billy says. He’s met Steve’s mom enough times. Billy turns his head and they’re so close Steve can see all the little freckles on Billy’s nose and sprinkled across his cheeks and his heart feels uncomfortably big in his chest.

That’s when he knows. It’s terrifying.

Steve tells Billy one afternoon when Billy gets glass in his foot walking around the pool due to the previous week’s party and the incidents of shattered bottles resulting from wasted Hawkins High grads. It must be a decent sized shard because Billy is hissing, hopping on one foot, and Steve kind of wishes he could take video but he should probably focus on extracting the glass. They’re both in trunks as Steve throws an arm around Billy’s shoulders (probably unnecessary) and helps him into the kitchen.

“Don’t touch it!” Steve says. “You’ll just drive it in deeper.”

“Fuckin’ stings, man.”

“Hold on…” Steve finds a needle and a pair of tweezers and some alcohol and then Billy’s foot is in his lap under the bright light of the kitchen. “Fuckin’ maniacs,” Steve mutters, squinting at the tender ball of Billy’s foot and ever so gently poking at the tiny bit of glass with the needle. “Gonna be stepping in glass for the next year.”

Billy hisses and whines as Steve pokes the shard out of his foot bit by bit. “You’re such a baby,” Steve says, chuckling fondly. “Didn’t bitch this much when you almost got eaten by that demodog-”

“I was  _drunk_ when I almost got eaten by the demodog,” Billy points out.

“Yeah well, nobody said to bring Jager to a monster fight, dumbass.”

“It was fun though.”

“Okay….aha!”  Steve extracts the entire shard with the tweezers and drops it on the table and without thinking he kisses the ball of Billy’s foot. It’s all very surreal. Billy doesn’t react badly or anything, just kind of smirks. So Steve’s brain take the opportunity to make him blurt out: “I’m in love with you.”

Steve watches Billy’s eyelashes flutter and his mouth does a weird quivering thing it’s never done before and Billy softly says, “Yeah okay. I mean me too. Yeah.”

So Steve kisses him.

They’re naked in Steve’s bed later and Steve has never felt so pleasantly exhausted. Everything feels euphoric in the warm post-sex twilight of his room. He’s taking his time attempting to inspect every little freckle on Billy’s body and right now he’s stuck on a shoulder that he can’t quite stop kissing.

“You know,” Billy says, staring up at the ceiling, “how there’s that one weird second when you figure out you’re gonna fall like a fuckin’ rock for somebody? Like you know you’re fucked, it just hasn’t happened yet?”

Steve hasn’t considered that one before. The knowing _before_  it even starts. He didn’t even know when it did start.

“Oh…” Steve blinks up at Billy. Kisses his shoulder yet again. “When did you know you were gonna fall for me then?”

“When I got down off that stupid keg,” Billy says, smiling sweetly at Steve as if it’s such a romantic story (which he supposes now it is), “and my first thought was that I wanted to see your face as if you’d care or whatever. And I plowed through everybody to get to you. That’s when I knew I was gonna be royally fucked.”

Steve sits up a little and grins at him marveling at this new reality: His Billy, his baby, being such a romantic little dork.

“Yeah?” Steve says. “And when did you start to actually fall?”

“About one second later,” Billy says. “When you took off your shades and looked at me.”

 


End file.
